Front End

Front End

Gloomy grey day here, a perfect backdrop for sifting through Engineers contracts for a current proposal.  Despite a few false starts they all arrived and the scope of work and fees were all good for a final presentation to the owners. Although we commonly call this the Front End of a project it’s actually more toward the thorax, as a lot of work had to be done ahead of this to even get these figures together.

All professions have their “rules of thumb” and ours is certainly no exception.  Be it time billing, percentage of construction (co-least favorite) or per square foot (co- #2) , everyone has a way of determining “their price”.  For quite some time in the 90’s and early 2000’s I used what I termed Value Pricing. It was a hit when things were booming because it spoke only to what I could bring to the project and the inherent value-added.  Owner’s loved it. These days most in our profession are scrambling to just get work and could care less about “value”. Such is the double shame of a crap economy.  

It trickles across and down the entire page of the Economic Crossword Puzzle. Skimp a bit here to save a fraction of a %=$  and in 2 years when the warranty is up , the same head and fist shaking will start again that has existed in all “slumps”. “Why?”. In fact I had a call yesterday from a contractor about a project he’s working on and his need to go back in to undo and fix just this thing. Human nature is continuously fascinating.

Doctors, Lawyers, CPA’s and even House Painters know the importance of the Front End, yet in our business it’s the 1^st thing to get negotiated. Diagnosis, Discovery, Historical Data and Priming. Try skimping on the Front End of those and, well, I rest my case…(and continue to shake my head).

Edy and I had a discussion last night about Optimism and Pessimism and I commented that we are a bit “too Virgo” to look at a Glass to determine if it is Half Full or Half Empty.  The 1^st thing we would do is look at the glass and say, “Why did they choose THAT Glass for this experiment?”….and discuss that for a bit until we noticed a smudge or a chip or confirmed “what the heck THAT IS?” in the glass…….then determine quickly that the experiment was flawed and any results tabulated would be biased toward….(fill in the blank) …..Clean freaks, Wine drinkers, Water drinkers, Bad Dishwasher loaders….anyway you get it and we just determined to avoid any such experiments at all, on the Front End.